Fiction
Paddle or Plunge
78. 6d.) IT is fatal for the artist to write a true story before he has so completely reimagined and reintegrated his material that it has become untrue. A mere paddling in the stream is useless. He must kick up his heels and plunge into imagination's current. Mr. Hudson, on whom the hand of truth lies heavy, has attempted the paddler's compromise. A thorough plunge would have washed away a great deal of the laborious and awkward in an otherwise distinguished novel. As it is, he would seem to have had a strenuous time with his material, for it has been agglomerated, rearranged and rewritten from earlier published works.
A True Story is a long and detailed study in the spiritual development of Richard Kurt, a very ordinary, will-less, stultified young man of half-Germanic parentage, from child- hood to the final collapse of his marriage at the age of thirty- five.
The main episodes are his fatal marriage with a narrow and ambitious American gold-digger, and, after a violent love affair with a mannish Italian girl, his " rescue " from a life of purposeless, wealthy boredom at the hands of a woman of high moral principles. The childhood narrative written, by one of Mr. Hudson's many technical devices, first in the naive language of the child, developing into schoolboy slang, and from that to the impatient prose of adolescence, is extremely well done. Here one sees the genesis and growth of the enmity with his father—a successful banker of precise mind and hypocritical character—which is the main factor in the boy's character. After the marriage snare has entrapped him in America, Mr. Hudson shows a tendency to labour the wrong point, an inability to enlarge himself from what is presumably known fact, and a weakness for skipping the course of psychological development. He does not, for instance, confront one squarely and dramatically with the reception by the boy's family of his marriage. One sees this obliquely. By dodging the dramatic meeting of father and son Mr. Hudson saps all sense of purpose from the narrative. From that point onwards it is difficult to sustain much interest in Richard. This is a great pity, for the relationship between father and son is the one thing that Mr. Hudson understands pro - foundly, and the fitful tracing of that relationship through the years, with its growth from enmity to armed neutrality, furtive sympathy and affection is—if the reader will piece it together— the best thing in the book. Beside this the wanderings of Richard and his wife in Sicily and Italy in a milieu of dull foreign princes and Anglo-American dilettanti—whom Mr. Hudson accepts with surprising solemnity—are as dull as a clay-to-day diary. Richard's affair with- the extraordinary Italian tomboy, Virginia, stands out in vivid though aggrav- ating relief, but the intrigue proceeds laboriously from one mystification to another, while Mr. Hudson, nerve-racked and baffled, brings it to what seems to me an outrageous judgment.
One would like to praise this book because there is some excellent work of a very subtle order in it, but I leave it with a general impression of flat-footed truth paddling where it ought to have plunged, and a feeling that, having severe notions on Richard's wealth; Mr. Hudson has written an admonitory pamphlet on the young man's life and family, rather than a story.
" Relentless " starts with the handicap of the immense expectations aroused by the author's previous novel Hanging Johnny. - In one respect the new book does not disappoint them, for it is a startling and original flight of the imagination. Oscar Berenger, the son of an explorer, grows up a wastrel and a violent enemy of civilization. Unable to. endure England any longer he drags his miserable chorus-girl wife and her babies to the remotest part of Siberia, and there lives the life of a Savage. It is the making of him, but the death of his wife. As the -years pass, his children, some of whom are born in Siberia, and all of whom have been sedulously kept in ignorance of civilization and the past and have grown- up entirely uneducated, find themselves uncomprehendingly at odds with their father and their environment. Eventually, when he takes them back to civilization, they realize they have been robbed of a heritage. They have lived like savages, but their minds have centuries of civilization behind them. Led by one of the youngest boys, an epileptic, and seconded by the only girl who has cherished all her life the determination to avenge her mother, they rebel and their father is laid low. The entry of the girl at this crisis in the story is a master stroke. The book is at once powerfully and sentimentally conceived, for the author is presenting a case as well as exposing a tragedy. Berenger's tragedy is her lesson. This is the main weakness of the story. There are two other shocks to the readers' faith : the mechanical abruptness with which the family is shown, now in England, now in Siberia, is a shock to the reader ; and the fact that no strong reasons that would have forced Berenger to bring the children back are given. Miss Johnston's command of language is as yet incommensurate with the remarkable demands of her imagination. However, the story does very nearly come off. It has strength, unity and spirit. Miss Johnston never sinks into the melodramatic, but is expert in the subtleties and pities of the tragic muse.
The theme of Miss Dashwood's novel can be found in several books published by feminine novelists this year. They mark, with sharp-tongued comment and satire, the changes in fashion and status that have come over the sex during the last generation. Poor mamma, once so terrifying in her spiky prudery and in her determination to marry her children well, so monumental in her public talk of Character, so shrewd in her instinct for pounds, shillings and pence, is irreverently unmasked by her daughters. One finds these conventional ingredients in Miss Dashwood's highly amusing story of Lady Pomfret's attempts to marry off her three daughters in the already slightly absurd reign of King Edward VII. Of the three, the ever shilly-shallying, stupid and entrancing Lydia proves the most interesting and the most difficult ; and her painful efforts to win the admiration of a strong, shy suitor, without losing her dignity or her chances, are shown with great cunning and malice. Lydia is maddening, heartrending and delicious in her panicky drift towards spinsterhood. Un- fortunately Miss Dashwood has overdone her satire by adding an epilogue in which the three daughters are caught stranded for a moment at the matrimonial ebb tide, an unnecessary, farcical and sentimental touch of the " Plus ca change . . . " kind, to an intelligent book. It is the Book Society's Choice.
None So Pretty is also recommended from on high, for it won the first prize in an historical novel competition. Subtract the Restoration embellishments and one is left with the tenuous story of a young bride of seventeen who, married to a besotted squire who refuses to consummate the marriage, be- comes successively the mistress of his soul-tortured chaplain, and of a young Royalist who had been in exile in France. The consequences are tragic, pretty and unmoving. These are sketchy and shadowy creatures who, though unOppressed with the fustian of Wardour Street, have more " period " than character, and are not strong enough to hold either the his- torical or the human tangle together. The marriage between history and story, like the marriage between Nan and the squire, has not been consummated. The book is pleasantly
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